Mueller And The FISA MoU Revisited

It seems like a long time ago, but it was only May 25, 2019, that I published a fairly detailed summary of what was known about the Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) between the FBI and the CIA that the two agencies entered into in 2012. By the terms of the MoU the FBI gave the CIA permission to FBI resources to access NSA databases, opening up CIA access to information on Americans within the US. In other words, the MoU allowed the CIA--using private contractors--to "spy on" (h/t AG Bill Barr) Americans within the US, and most people would suppose that this was the FBI conducting their legitimate counterintelligence (CI) business. Of course, the terms of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) forbade the CIA from accessing such data. This occurred while Robert Mueller was Director FBI. At CIA this would have happened either under Acting Director Mike Morrell or Director David Petraeus. The point is that this likely happened in time for the Presidential election of 2012, facilitating--and here's that word again--"spying" on the Romney campaign. Thus, I titled that post Obama Almost Certainly Spied On Willard. I'll be republishing that post, below--for a reason.

As I've mentioned several times, I've been ploughing through the archives of articles on the Russia Hoax by J. E. Dyer. Last night I came across one that contained a reference to a visit Robert Mueller made to the White House in April, 2016, nearly three years after leaving the FBI. While Dyer doesn't relate Mueller's visit directly to the MoU--in fact she frankly states that the visit is a bit of a mystery--I believe that a nexus with the MoU is the easiest way to make sense of that visit. The nature of the MoU and the role that it plays in explaining the full extent of Obama's domestic spying (with Mueller's cooperation) was the subject of the post I just linked. I drew heavily on research published at CTH in that post, but here I intend to add that one crucial explanatory element that Dyer mentions--Mueller's visit to the White House. (Dyer gives credit to "Katica", which is where I first saw this visit mentioned.)

So, below, I'll append the linked post so that all the details will be in one spot, but to lead up to that I'll provide details regarding Mueller's visit to the White House. That visit will be placed within a timeline, but the timeline itself is quite simple, consisting of only three dates--although a few contextualizing dates will be added. So, let's begin.

We've already seen that the MoU between the FBI and the CIA was entered into in 2012. Details on the legal significance of this MoU can be found below. For our purposes, at this point, just bear in mind (as FISC Chief Judge Rosemary Collyer noted) that an MoU that violates the law is simply ... illegal. If FISA forbade CIA access to this type of information, Robert Mueller had no authority to allow the CIA to use FBI resources to circumvent the provisions of FISA. The existence of this MoU came to Judge Collyer's attention on March 9, 2016, as a result of oversight by "DoJ personnel conducting a minimization review"--a review for compliance with minimization rules that are a key part of FISA. Apparently the DoJ oversight personnel found a large number of violations and, when they pressed the FBI for an explanation, discovered that there was more going on than simple bureaucratic mistakes. Here is how Judge Collyer describes the beginning of the inquiry that she became a key part of: